Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The girls and I have a number of AMC hut stays coming up. Hut stays are enjoyable, but spending the night in one costs big bucks. It takes planning and budgeting to make such overnights happen, and once you're within fourteen days of your reservation, there's no refund should you decide to cancel. This means one needs to be flexible regarding ascent trails and start times; for example, if the weather had been foul last Sunday morning, we would have abandoned our original plan of climbing a specific cliff trail and, instead, gone up a sheltered (and relatively boring) route.

Over the past four years, the girls and I have stayed at every hut in the AMC system except for Mizpah Springs. Therefore, Mizpah Springs was first on our hut stay list this year. We decided to ascend "new-to-us" Webster Cliff Trail and go over both Webster and Jackson before arriving at Mizpah. There's a much faster, shorter, and completely sheltered way to get to this hut, but the girls and I were bent on tackling the rock scrambles. Whenever there's a choice between sheltered (boring) and scrambly/exposed, we'll take the latter.

Unfortunately, the forecast called for severe storms on the afternoon of our hike. This meant we'd have to get a super-early start in order to make it up and over both exposed summits before the thunderstorms moved in. If the forecast had called for a perfect day, then we could have started the hike at 10am or so. Instead, we had our boots on the trail at 6am.

Starting at 6am means you're on the road early...early enough to catch the moose at their morning jogs.

In all seriousness, this gal was casually trotting right down the center of the road, not caring one iota about the cars who had to drive 10mph behind her. It was a cute sight, and the sound of her clop-clop-clopping was a nice way to start the day.

After she finished her morning run, she stood by the side of the road and gazed at the parade of cars that had formed behind her.

Webster Cliffs at 6am on a hot and humid morning.

Trailhead! Webster Cliff Trail is part of the Appalachian Trail...we were hoping we'd meet some thru-hikers on this trip, and we weren't disappointed (more on that later).

There's a bridge right at the beginning of the trail...

...with a plaque commemorating the service of 4000 Footer Club founding member Albert Robertson.

Soon after crossing the bridge, the trail gets steep and stays steep.

Rock steps...

Remnants of wooden steps...

Minor ledge scramble.﻿

View from the first lookout ledge.

Mt. Willey...

A peek of Frankenstein Cliffs...

Continuing onward and upward...

A glimpse of Mt. Webster...

Looking back at the first lookout ledge...

Another minor scramble...

View of Mt. Willey from the second major lookout ledge...

Looking down from the second lookout ledge.

Onward and upward...

Cairn at the top of a scramble (not the summit)...

There are a few herd paths up here...the girls point in the right direction (toward Webster) in the picture below.

Going down into a little col...

...before ascending the final rocks up Mt. Webster.

There are some wonderful bits of scrambling just beneath Webster's summit.

Sage on the summit of Mt. Webster!

Alex on the summit of Mt. Webster!

View from the top of Mt. Webster.

So far, so good. We'd been blessed with gorgeous views and the thunderstorms hadn't yet materialized. We set off toward Mt. Jackson.

We almost ran into this hanging caterpillar...

Up a couple more rock scrambles...

On the summit of Jackson!

Looking toward Mizpah Hut and Mt. Pierce. The hut is that bit of white in the woods near the upper right corner of the photo.

We stopped here for a snack but didn't linger for long; we had 1.6 miles to go and the skies to our south looked a bit dark.

Pressing on toward Mizpah...

Crossing a muddy alpine meadow...

Hut!

It had taken us four and a half hours to get from the parking lot to the hut on Webster Cliff Trail; book time is four hours and fifty-five minutes.

After securing our bunks for the evening, the girls and I visited neighboring Nauman Tentsite and spoke with a small group of northbound thru-hikers. The girls gave each of them a Hershey Bar, which they each happily ate with gusto. We hung about for fifteen minutes and enjoyed a brief conversation with them before they continued on their way.

During our stay at Mizpah, we had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with a couple more thru-hikers, Hawkeye and a woman whose trailname I didn't get. They were taking the "work-for-stay" option -- the AMC huts allow thru-hikers to spend the night and eat for free in exchange for the completion of various chores.

I always enjoy speaking with and listening to thru-hikers. I fully intend to walk the entire Appalachian Trail as a thru-hiker one day, with or without the girls. If Alex and Sage ever want to do it -- and they'd have to really want to do it -- then we'll go as a family. Otherwise, I'll wait until they've both left for college. I figure if I keep hiking the Whites on a weekly basis, then I should be in decent enough shape to tackle the AT in my early 50s.

Since we got to the hut at a ridiculously early hour (10:30!), no thunderstorms ever arrived. Had we left at 10am and hiked through the early afternoon, however, we'd have been struck by lightning for sure. That's just how these things go...

The next morning, both girls built a few small cairns before hitting the trail.

We didn't want to return to our car via Webster Cliff Trail. It had rained buckets during the night and we had no desire to descend those scrambles while the rocks and ledges were wet. We therefore chose Mizpah Cutoff and Crawford Path for our descent (we'd have to walk 4.5 miles on Route 302 after returning to the road, but oh well).

The descent went quickly and the roadwalk wasn't too bad (it was all downhill). We were back at our start before we knew it.